Vote down?

Good tutorial, though I have to admit that I am a little divided on user styles.

Whilst I think it can be useful to allow users to modify styles if they (for example) have special needs, putting this in the hands of the mainstream user could be a recipe for disaster.

It is already time consuming enough to get a site rendering correctly in a range of browsers – by throwing this technique into the equation you introduce an unknown variable to the website developer, and if there is a problem as a result its the poor developer, and not the user, who will likely get blamed.

I’ve seen this happen a lot with the Firefox extension GTDInbox which adds functionality to GMail by injecting CSS/Javascript into the page – usually when Google makes a major update something breaks, either making the extension unusable or in some cases making the entire site unusable.

There is also the other argument that by using this to remove entire sections of websites, you are depriving the webmaster of ad revenue or even the chance to promote other products/services.

I like the proposal advocating an OpenBrand standard, though I don’t think this would necessarly resolve both the problems above.